The Scale

Paul Dârvariu
On my birthday, the boys made me a gift. On the box Work-Life balance was written. Supposedly it is a device which helps you have a balanced life. It only reacts to excesses. If you work too hard, his magic eye turns red. And green if you have fun too much. Yesterday I described the kitchen to my wife and the magic eye turned red. It turned off only after drinking a bottle of wine and turned green after having another one. I am waiting for Cocuța to come back from the countryside. I am curious to find if sex with your own wife is considered a torment or a pleasure.

George Dometi
She was very happy when she had received it. Nobody suspected what followed next. The smoke rolls still remind us of the fire that burst two nights ago in the headquarters. Nancy programmed EveR6 to go back to its place, but she selected fire. Dozens of glowing, well-aimed tongues spread in all corners of the lab. The entire archive was burned to ashes, the fleshless bones from the high temperatures still looked like researchers, and on the coroners' scale the ashes were quite heavy.

Carmen Tot
She was kind of undressed for that hard autumn. She was not stalking the cars, but, when one was pulling over to the side, she would step with a leg in front of the other, moving her hips and would speak gravely as in a movie: were you looking for me? I liked her, that is why I noticed her and then I asked her how much she wants, she said fifty, it was a lot for a whore, I said I'll give it to her and I gave it to her more than she expected, in the alleyway, till I exhausted her. The next day she was still there, bruised and she called me, left me exhausted, stabbed, in the same alleyway. She told me we were even, we shall see from now on.

(Translated by Irina Vild / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)


Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In December 2023, the group has 12,210 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.